SAN ANTONIO — A day after Arizona was ranked No.1 for the first time in history, Dec. 21, 1987, the Wildcats played at Washington State. It was the wrong place at the wrong time for WSU’s first-year head coach Kelvin Sampson.
“It was like walking through the forest,” Sampson said after Arizona won 89-55 with Steve Kerr swishing his first five 3-point shots. “There’s lions and tigers in the woods and sometimes they’ll jump on you.”
Those lions and tigers coached by Lute Olson had no mercy on Sampson’s Cougars. Arizona was 15-0 against Sampson before he left WSU in 1994 to become head coach at Oklahoma. Arizona’s average margin of victory: 19 points.
And then Sampson fought back. In the quarter-century since he left WSU, Sampson has twice eliminated Arizona from the NCAA Tournament, both time as Sooners coach: 61-60 in a 1999 first-round upset and 88-67 in the 2002 Sweet 16.
Now, 20 years later, Sampson and the Wildcats meet in the Sweet 16 again and there’s no fear of getting jumped by lions and tigers. Rather, it’s Arizona that has concerns about being jumped by Cougars — Sampson’s Houston Cougars.
Over the last five college basketball seasons, only Gonzaga (155) has won more games than Houston (142). The roles aren’t fully reversed — remember, Arizona is the No. 1 seed — but the Cougars seem to be a trendy choice to use their defense and toughness to send the Wildcats home in tears.
This is a long way from Sampson’s start as a basketball coach — 1982 at Montana Tech — when he recruited and signed a one-armed player, John Barker. One arm or two, the Orediggers won 22 games, became champions of the Frontier Conference, launching Sampson’s transient coaching career.
Now 66, Sampson is making the fourth chapter of his head coaching odyssey one for the books. He survived two NCAA investigations and attendant penalties, those which led to a six-year detour as an NBA assistant coach.
When Sampson was hired by Houston in 2014, the school had not won an NCAA Tournament game since the 1984 Final Four. The Cougars have since gone to a pair of Sweet 16s and a Final Four. The man who once went 0-15 against Arizona saved his best for last.
If Sampson hasn’t engineered the nation’s most thorough and impressive reconstruction project of the last 20 years, he’s no worse than No. 2 behind Baylor’s Scott Drew.
If you examine his coaching history closely, this is a familiar pattern. Sampson got absolutely zero national attention at Washington State, but those inside the Pac-10 suspected Sampson was on the path to success. He was the league’s coach of the year in 1991 and, by 1994, led the Cougars to just their third NCAA Tournament berth in 53 years.
But now there’s a difference. The 66-year-old Sampson has softened a bit.
After knocking Big Ten champion Illinois out of the NCAA Tournament last week, Sampson admitted he had not watched game film of the Illini the day before the game.
Houston coach Kelvin Sampson celebrates cutting the net after the Cougars won the American Athletic Conference regular-season title earlier this month.
“I didn’t watch film last night,” he said. “Twenty years ago, I might have watched, but I had about 15 minutes to play with my granddaughter before she went to bed last night, so I elected to play with her.”
Sampson’s formula at Houston is like that of TCU, the aggressive rebound-and-defense club that forced Arizona into overtime Sunday. The difference is that Houston has better players than TCU.
This isn’t Washington State, 1987 anymore. Sampson’s first recruit as WSU’s head coach was LaVar Ball, father of NBA standouts Lonzo and LaMello. LaVar Ball averaged just 2.2 points in one season under Sampson, and then moved on, his playing days at an end. Sampson was still figuring it out.
After beating Illinois, he said much of his latter-day success at Houston is due to spending six years as an assistant coach for the Milwaukee Bucks and Houston Rockets.
“Being in the NBA showed me what I didn’t know,” he said. “Sometimes you get in those situations, and you just get humbled. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. When I first got to the NBA, I thought I could coach an NBA team. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. I wasn’t anywhere close to being qualified.”
So he went back to basketball school. After being fired during an NCAA investigation at Indiana, Sampson learned while working with Kevin McHale and Scott Skiles.
“Everything I saw was just eye-opening. I had this little yellow legal pad and I was staying in this hotel, and every night after practice, I’d go back and write things down that I learned,” Sampson said. “Then to help me learn it even more, I would copy it — just kept writing them down. I was writing the same thing down over and over, and then I’d draw stuff up that I learned. It just blew me away.”
Sampson’s late-in-life education process has elevated Houston to Top-25 status for the last five seasons. The Cougars are ranked No. 2 in the latest KenPom.com analytics poll — one spot ahead of UA — and although NBA mock drafts don’t include any Cougars starters, Houston has become known as the Team You Don’t Want To Play.
That’s a long way from recruiting a one-arm player to help the Montana Tech Orediggers to the Frontier League championship.
See snow and wind on Mount Lemmon at Radio Ridge. Video by Southern Arizona Timelapses.
